Two weeks ago, I was summarily informed in a brief email from YouTube that our Russian Faith channel—on which we had spent hundreds of hours of hard work and which complements the Russian Faith website, which I own, had been ‘terminated.’ No reason was given other than a very general one which could mean anything.

Russian Faith is a new media project I started in September: a website, YouTube channel (now banned), Facebook, and Twitter – to cover Christian issues in general, and the huge story of the renaissance of Christianity in Russia.

This dramatic turn by both government and society in Russia is very important not just for Christians, but for the whole world, regardless of their religious views, because it has so many ramifications important to us Americans.

It should affect our foreign policy, and it contrasts with the hostility to Christian values in our own Western societies. It is a fact that Russia has emerged as the leading defender of world Christianity, and it is a disgrace that liberal forces in the US elites and the government are among Christianity’s most hostile foes – both at home and abroad.

Millions of Russians now routinely march for Christianity

Observing the Christian renaissance in Russia first hand while living there, I realized that this story is being badly misunderstood, misrepresented, and under-reported – another massive fail by the mainstream media. No surprises here.

When we launched, we received glowing reviews, enthusiastic support and encouragement from the public, and raised over $10,000 from hundreds of small donors in an initial crowdfund.

The videos which were banned were of the most positive character – videos about love, sacrifice and charity, about honor and respect. YouTube banned them ALL – and most incredibly – refuses to explain why!

I have started and managed successful YouTube channels and understand the environment very well, and it is obvious to me that this is deliberate censorship. Blocking monetization, suppression of views, and manipulation of statistics, is a huge, persistent problem, and there has been a dramatic increase over the past two months across all the big tech platforms.

I have been monitoring this with increasing alarm. If you think this is un-American, then please sign our petition below, and follow my personal pages on Facebook or Twitter. I will be talking more about these encroachments on our rights in the coming weeks and months.

I and the Russian Faith team feel violated – our constitutional rights have been trampled on, our hard work trashed. Our ability to fund this site, which we started on a shoestring thanks to hundreds of small donations from people all across America and the world, has been attacked.

Russian Faith is a labor of love – everyone involved has given and sacrificed to share good things with the world. Here is our initial crowdfund video explaining why we started this (and yes, this one was banned by YouTube too):

We’ve decided to fight back – and have started a petition (sign below) and other measures. If you agree that it is time for Christians of all denominations to speak up against the hostility coming from the elites who control our media and big tech platforms, please join us (see below).

Our views are socially conservative, reflecting the views of the Russian Orthodox Christian Church, which includes being critical of the LGBT movement – and I suspect that is where the problem lies (see below).

The censorship wreaked havoc on our website because we had embedded the videos in dozens of articles, all of which were now showing empty grey boxes where videos used to be. Many of those articles were about the videos, rendering the articles meaningless.

In many cases, we had spent hundreds of hours painstakingly translating videos which were in Russian into English, embedding the subtitles. All this was swept away with a keystroke from a nameless YouTube censor who won’t even condescend to explain what his reasons were.

We will have to spend hundreds of hours fixing it all at considerable expense.

A Russian ‘face blessing’ with Holy Water

Most importantly, we had our crowdfunding video on that channel, and it had been embedded on many websites across the internet – all of this was also crippled by YouTube’s arbitrary decision. And we depend on the crowdfunding to survive.

Currently, we are still unable to publish our usual volume of content because our small team has to repair all this gratuitous and unnecessary damage.

This is deliberate censorship

I am very familiar with YouTube’s rules and guidelines, and I can say with absolute certainty that they discriminated against us, and treated us unfairly as if they were deliberately looking for a reason to shut us down.

The way it usually works is that if you do make a mistake, YouTube gives you a warning, which you can dispute – and only if you accumulate a certain number of these ‘strikes’, and are unable to disprove them, and refuse to take the videos down, does YouTube take the drastic measure of banning your channel.

We got no such warning and had not been notified of any ‘strikes’. The ban came out of the blue.

If there were some violations on any of the videos, why didn’t YouTube notify us? Why did they not give us a chance to take down the videos? Why didn’t they give us a chance to dispute any complaints, if there were any? Why do they refuse to answer questions about this? Obviously, they wanted to ban the whole channel, and to stop it altogether. But why?

The banned videos:

Here are four videos which are entirely typical of everything that was banned. Links, titles, and descriptions of ALL the other videos that were on the channel are listed at the end of this article.

What is remarkable is not just that there was nothing offensive in these videos, rather that they were overwhelmingly positive – promoting ideas and values that one could only describe as admirable, regardless of your religious beliefs.

That YouTube would so zealously seek to ban them is beyond strange.

The importance of paying special attention to Jesus’ words in the Bible:

How strong marriages require sacrifice:

How Russian priests during the revolution preferred death rather than renounce their faith:

Were we banned for criticism of LGBT?

The only video which I guess might have triggered YouTube was this one, an excerpt on ‘gay theology’ from a Russian documentary film critical of the LGBT movement. In my opinion, it is fair and balanced.

The leftist social activism of YouTube and their pushing of the LGBT agenda on Americans who want nothing of it is notorious. But if it was that clip that upset them, why didn’t they just ban that individual video? And why didn’t they ask us to take it down first? And why do they refuse to answer our queries?

The hypocrisy of YouTube is appalling – while pouncing on videos like these, they allow an enormous amount of moral filth. Type in any term related to the human anatomy in YouTube search, and you will get an avalanche of what is essentially pornography. Obscenity, obscene lyrics and bizarre calls to violence in songs are all over YouTube. Here is an excellent article describing YouTube’s weird double-standard.

A Christian procession in honor of a popular saint (Alexander Nevsky) in St. Petersburg

Regulate the big tech companies – it’s time

There are now thousands of reports of similar heavy-handed censorship coming from the major tech platforms in what appears to be a crack-down on dissent in any form, on the left and the right, but more on the right, including some big names, like Roger Stone, Paul Joseph Watson, Syrian Girl, Alex Jones, SouthFront, Gab, much of the Alt-Right, and now even the Russian channels RT and Sputnik.

The big tech companies tipped the scales in favor of Hillary Clinton in 2016, and now they are becoming even more blatant in their meddling.

Here is Tucker Carlson in August demanding that Google (which owns YouTube) be regulated, because it cannot be trusted. I completely agree with him.

There is talk that Trump is planning to push for regulation of the tech giants before the midterm election campaigns get underway in mid 2018. If so, it comes none-too-soon.

My message to the elites who own Youtube:

Dear Sergey Brin and Larry Page (founders and owners of Google, and controlling shareholders of YouTube), you are immigrants from the USSR. You should have more respect for the freedoms and morals of the country that took you in.

Eric Schmidt and YouTube shareholders – I hope you are reading this.

This is the digital equivalent of tyranny. It is the same as breaking and entering, and smashing equipment and property that represents hundreds of hours of hard work by honest, hard-working Americans – all to push your left-wing so-called ‘values’ on people who reject them.

You have failed in your obligation to America to provide free and fair access to the views of all Americans.

You have failed in your obligation to keep smut and lechery away from our children.

It is you who have meddled in our democracy. Your behavior is un-American and harmful to our values and beliefs.

Break-up the big tech companies:

For these reasons, I call upon Washington to bring you to heel, to:

nationalize you and break up your companies with antitrust legislation,

prosecute you for violating the constitution, and

sue you for damages – which for me and the hundreds of people who sacrificed and donated to make Russian Faith happen are now all too real.

Trust me, this will happen. You curtail our freedom of speech at your own peril!

We’re fighting back – join us!

I am still thinking about how to respond to all this. One thing is for sure, I would go to war for my country (I did – I am a vet), and the right that keeps us all free – the right to say openly what we believe to be true – so you better believe I’m going to fight back.

I’ve already begun: I’ve started a petition, a Facebook group, and a financial support page on a platform which supports content creators (Patreon), to help fund the creation of more and better videos and articles about Christianity in general, and the Christian revolution in Russia.

If you want to support my fight against anti-Christian censorship, then please sign the petition right here and now, join the Facebook group, and if possible make a small contribution.

Here’s the petition:

The best way to get others to join us is to share this article with your friends and family by email and on social media.

If we get a good response with this initial petition sign-up, we will launch similar ones on the major online petition sites, like Change.org, Stand United, and CitizenGo.

If you don’t want to sign the petition, but want to be kept informed by email:

I’m looking into legal action, reaching out to Christian activist groups across the country, and considering doing a crowdfund to raise money to create more and better videos and articles about Christianity.

What I do depends very much on how you, the readers, respond. If you think I’m on the right track – or not, please let me know.

If you can help with any of these initiatives, for example, with legal advice, or how to launch successful online petitions, please contact me directly. We have to raise the alarm about what is happening to our country and our values.

Please speak up in the comments section below. Let’s get a serious discussion going right here about what we can do to push back against this thuggish behavior.

By far, the most effective way to help: share this article and encourage friends and family to sign up.

Here is a list of ALL the other videos which were on the channel – ALL of them banned along with the whole channel:

(I put them on my channel because I think they are wonderful videos, I think you might find them fun to watch. I’ve either reloaded them onto my personal YouTube account or found them elsewhere on YouTube.)

How the horrors of war led a man to faith: From Afghan veteran to Christian priest – WATCH

The story of a beautiful 500 year old monastery in the Russian far North (Solovki) – WATCH

Political correctness is a tool of Western Godless elites to persecute Christians – Head of Russian Church – WATCH

Addicted to your Smartphone? What if you felt the same way about your Bible? – WATCH